Well, I took the plunge. I traded Walmart.com $298.00 for an Acer Aspire One, free shipping, site-to-store.

I love it.

The Vista that came with the machine never had a chance.No kindness.No dual boot.No shot at breathing the breath of life.I booted Knoppix, partitioned the hard drive, and infused it with Fedora 11 (sorry Steve, but Ubuntu 9.04 did not support the Wifi chip).

Being a truck driver, Steve runs into a good many people from different walks of life. Basically, anyone shipping large items is going to need the services of a trucking company at some point in time.

Steve has never been one to come up short on opinions. If he loves a product, or hates it, you're likely to hear about.

"Big C" works at a company that enlists the services of Steve's employer, so it would be unlikely that "Big C" has heard Steve relating his Linux stories.

Well, not to long ago Steve gave "Big C" a copy of Ubuntu 9.04 and a demo of Ubuntu on Steve's Dell Ubuntu Laptop (Inspiron 1545N).

"Big C" was impressed, but still had questions about journey from Windows to Linux. The Ubuntu disk sat patiently by until one of "Big C"'s Windows boxes fell to a crafty virus and refused to access the internet.

Well, I answered one question on the phone and "Big C" installed Ubuntu from that CD. He ended up with an Ubuntu Linux 9.04 partition that could access the internet and the accomplishment of creating a "dual boot" machine with Windows and Ubuntu.

I didn't ask "Big C" how many times he had installed an operating system before, but, it would not surprise me if that was his first.